The Garden Thread that two people wanted

[LilyBLily]

That's interesting. Usually, we have both males and females at our feeder, but this year up to five females have been vying with each other to get at the nectar.

Beautiful gardenias. 

[Jan Hurst-Nicholson]

The cycad in our retirement village is in fruit. It has been there for many years and is in the original garden on the land that was used to build the village. Fortunately it is mostly hidden from view as they are quite valuable.

"They are also one of the most threatened groups of plants in the world. In South Africa almost 70% of our cycad species are threatened with extinction, with four species on the brink of extinction and seven species with fewer than 100 plants left in the wild."

"Do you need a permit to own a cycad in South Africa?
Because cycads are protected by the national and provincial legislation, as a buyer you must ensure that you know where your plants come from and that you have a permit for owning the plant. Various permits are needed for any activity that relates to cycads such as possession, transport, growing, buying or selling."

[Jeff Tanyard]

There's some creeping cucumber growing here and there as weeds.  I'd never tried the fruit before, so I decided it was time.  I picked a few berries and ate them.  They do indeed taste like cucumber.





Here's some of it growing up on an azalea.  I'll eventually remove it.

[LilyBLily]

That cycad looks amazing.

I think the woolly aphids are back, but only in very small quantities. I've seen some bits of fluff supposedly floating around--and then veering sharply to land on something. I haven't been close enough to investigate, but I am suspicious. 

[Jan Hurst-Nicholson]

Never heard of creeping cucumber. Do you use it in a salad?

I've got some tiny c*cktail tomatoes growing from my compost heap. I left them to do their own thing and they started creeping up the bottle brush tree. I've sort of helped them by hanging them over the branches. Should have been nipping off the ends but left them to wander. They are now so high up I have to stretch to reach the ripe ones. Next thing it will require a ladder to reach them.   I see they are also growing in various parts of the garden where I put compost. Might have to cull a few.

[Jeff Tanyard]

Never heard of creeping cucumber. Do you use it in a salad?

Some people do, according to the internet.  I've never tried it before this week.

[Jeff Tanyard]

Picked and ate a few more creeping cucumber berries.

[Jan Hurst-Nicholson]

Picked and ate a few more creeping cucumber berries.

Make an interesting addition to a salad.

[Jeff Tanyard]

Still getting the occasional canna lily.





Here's a Joro spider munching on a grasshopper.  Notice the mass of silk strands just above her.  I think this might be a stabilimentum, though that's just a guess on my part.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stabilimentum





This Joro is a fully mature female.  You can tell by the color pattern on her back.  The juveniles have a different pattern.

Call me a weirdo, but I really do think they're handsome critters.   

The black and yellow patterns on the spider's sides and underside remind me of Ambassador Kosh's ship from Babylon 5.  None of the spiders have yet tried to communicate with me by spelling out words with their coloring, but I'm still hopeful.  If I can succeed in making contact, I'm going to change my name to Kosh and start wearing an encounter suit.

[Vijaya]

Really striking photos! Love the yellow silk.

[Jeff Tanyard]

Well, the "stabilimentum" is gone now, so I guess it wasn't a stabilimentum at all and was instead just clutter in the web that the spider decided to remove during her nightly remodeling session.  The grasshopper is also gone.

In another Joro web, the owner was munching on a stinkbug.  This is good.  Stinkbugs suck.

[Jeff Tanyard]

Some mid-October flowers for y'all's viewing pleasure:











For anyone who likes "hoary ancient forest" type imagery, here's a moss-covered dogwood:





Here's a Joro spiderweb I had to take down.  It was in my way, so it had to go.  The spider escaped to safety, so maybe she'll rebuild elsewhere.

You can see a male Joro a few inches above the female.  The males have been lurking in the webs since early September.  They're small, drab, and unremarkable, so I haven't mentioned them yet.  This is the first male Joro pic I've posted.  From what I've been able to observe so far, the female sits in the center of the orb part of the web while the males hang around on the outer "cage" part of the web. 

Also, you can see a tangled mass of silk just above the female.  A few days ago, I speculated that this sort of thing might be a stabilimentum, but then I changed my mind and decided it was just clutter.  Well, I've changed my mind again.  I'm seeing similar silk masses in several other webs, all just above the center of the orb.  Too many to be coincidental.  It's not clutter; whatever it is, it's there on purpose.

[Jan Hurst-Nicholson]

Lovely flowers. We are into Spring/Summer and also have lots of flowers coming into bloom.

[Jan Hurst-Nicholson]

This baby Jatropha was really determined and came up through the newly tarred pathway that had been dug up to fix a leak. 

[Jeff Tanyard]

Spring has definitely sprung here.  New leaves have appeared on the trees and bushes.

The big question that remains is whether or not we'll have a killing frost in the coming weeks.  I really hope not, because we've had a few of those in recent years, and I'd like to enjoy a spring without blackened frost-killed leaves and shoots.

[Jan Hurst-Nicholson]

A large (10 cm) snail has decided to roost in my pawpaw (papaya) tree. It moves about - at a snail's pace - 😛, but so far I haven't ascertained what it is eating. Should I find bite marks in my pawpaws it will be removed to another location.😀

[Vijaya]

What a pretty fellow!

[Jan Hurst-Nicholson]

What a pretty fellow!

We seem to have quite a number of them and often find their empty shells. One of our residents paints the shells in various coloured patterns and places them throughout our retirement village. 

[Jeff Tanyard]

Some of the flowers have bloomed.  Azaleas and bearded irises.  If you look carefully, you can see a dusting of pollen on the petals of the irises.








Only the purple irises have bloomed so far.  The other colors have yet to appear.

Black cherry tree has flowered.  Expecting fruit again in a couple of months.

Holly trees and presumed-to-be-Rubus plants have buds on them, so they should bloom in the coming weeks.

[Jeff Tanyard]

Holly trees are in bloom.  The air is tinged with the wonderful scent of holly flowers.   





The flowers don't last long at all, maybe a day or two.  They're constantly raining down from the tree as they fall off.  But there are many buds, and they don't all bloom at once, so that stretches the blooming period out a bit.  The pollinating insects are all over it, creating a nice background buzz.

Something else has started to bloom, too:





Looks like I was right about that mystery weed.   

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackberry

Looking forward to picking some fruit at some point.

[Jan Hurst-Nicholson]

Didn't know holly had a scent  .

Used to gather blackberries as a child. My Gran made blackberry and apple dumpling. Yummy.

[Vijaya]

Didn't know holly had a scent  .

Used to gather blackberries as a child. My Gran made blackberry and apple dumpling. Yummy.

I too have lovely memories picking blackberries with my kiddos. And blackberry wine is so delicious! In WA we picked wild berries June through Sept. Then the rains came and it'd be time for mushrooms. We just got new bees this evening for our hive! We'd all starve without bees.

[Jan Hurst-Nicholson]

I too have lovely memories picking blackberries with my kiddos. And blackberry wine is so delicious! In WA we picked wild berries June through Sept. Then the rains came and it'd be time for mushrooms. We just got new bees this evening for our hive! We'd all starve without bees.
[/quote]

Lovely to have bees and your own honey and knowing it is pure.

[Vijaya]

I posted some pictures of our new bees on my blog: https://vijayabodach.blogspot.com/2024/04/keeper-of-bees.html

[Jan Hurst-Nicholson]

I posted some pictures of our new bees on my blog: https://vijayabodach.blogspot.com/2024/04/keeper-of-bees.html

You have quite a menagerie. Lovely  . They must keep you busy.

[djmills]

Vijaya, I tried to leave a comment on your blog post, but needed a google login and then more google stuff so I backed out.
I love the bee hive. And the farm animals where you got the bees from. Enjoy the honey produced.

[Vijaya]

Thank you for visiting and commenting here. Without an acct. I got too much spam in the comments. But I get it, not wanting to have anything to do with google.

The first year we kept bees, we got enough honey to make mead. It took a long time until it became smooth--we'd taste it every 3 months and by 9 months it was lovely. I want to make candles and balms from all the beeswax too. Good stuff!

[Jeff Tanyard]

Quick update on my experiment with wild blackberries.

The berries form from the center of the dead flowers, so you get at most one berry per flower.  Most of those berries aren't panning out, though.  I think the plant doesn't get enough sun.  Only a few of the berries are growing to anywhere near full size.  Some are still green, most are red, and a couple have already turned black and will be ready to be picked very soon.

Some pics:

[LilyBLily]

What wild blackberries already set on the plant need is water first, sunshine second. If you can arrange for more water even if you can't manage more sunshine, you might end up with a decent crop. Otherwise, they'll tend to dry up and be disappointing.

As our trees have grown larger, our blackberries have retreated to only the sunny edges of the property or the occasional open spot in the middle. We've had a wet spring in WV, so the berries look promising. I have to spray them against the deer, though.

Cultivated blackberries are a lot nicer: no thorns, much larger fruit. The deer will go after them, too. 

My favored and inexpensive spray mix is water, egg, and garlic powder. Completely safe for the fruit, gentle to the environment, and no lingering smell noticeable to humans. It does wear off under repeated downpours, though.

[Jeff Tanyard]

There's been plenty of rain, so I doubt that's the problem.  Thanks for that advice, though; I'll keep it in mind.   

Like I've said before, this is an experiment, and I have absolutely no experience with blackberry plants, so I'm as out of my element as Donny from The Big Lebowski.   

Cultivated blackberries are a lot nicer: no thorns, much larger fruit.

The thorns are definitely a problem.  I'll have to wear gloves when I pick these things, and I'm not sure it's all worth it, frankly.  The berry-to-bush ratio is a lot smaller than I would like.  But I guess that's typical when you're growing wild weeds rather than cultivars.  At the end of the day, any edible fruit is still free food for which I had to do no work and spend no money, so there's that.

[Jeff Tanyard]

Yard/garden update:

Blackberries have been disappointing.  Not only is picking them a hassle due to the thorns, but most didn't get to any decent size, nor did they taste good.  I guess I learned the hard way why cultivars exist in the first place.  It's because the wild stuff sucks.     Anyway, I won't be keeping these weeds.

Joro spiders began to appear about a month ago.  They're tiny, but their bright yellow coloring makes them easy to identify.  The biggest ones are currently only about an inch long measured from toe to toe, and their bodies are about the size of a grain of rice.  That's just the few biggest ones; most are smaller than that.  They're numerous, though, as this species tends to go.  I counted a dozen of them in one azalea bush.  Joros are very tolerant of one another almost to the point of being communal.

I would request that everyone in the eastern third of the U.S. keep an eye out for Joro spiders and let us know if you spot any in your yard.  It will be interesting to know how far they've spread.

Black cherry tree produced a nice crop of berries.  I ate as many as I wanted, got tired of them, and left the rest for the critters.  The tiny size of these things--and having to spit out the pits--almost makes them more trouble than they're worth.

There was a brown thrasher family living under a gardenia.  I kept seeing a thrasher hop away from the bush, peck around for food, and then hop back and be greeted by a chorus of chirps.  Pretty neat.   

[LilyBLily]

Wild blackberries need a steady amount of water to produce, and they need to be picked fully ripe. Otherwise, they're small and bitter. There are thornless cultivars that produce much larger berries--three times the size--and aren't as desperate for water, either.

My wild black raspberries have gone nuts with all the rain we had in May, and they've gotten ahead of me despite picking a quart a day. I was outside this morning before 7 a.m. to avoid the heat wave and had to stop picking from sheer exhaustion. I've decided to cut back a large swath of the bushes that tend to produce smaller ones and just keep the newer group that gets more shade and thus produces larger berries. It's going to make my neighbors very happy, since the bushes tend to wildness. Ten-foot-tall primocanes.

The deer have been savaging my daylilies and I despair of seeing many blooms this year. I'd best go outside and spray them again right now. Daylilies are human edible, by the way, although I'm not a fan. My spray is edible, too, and completely safe, since it's only egg, garlic, and water.

[Vijaya]

I'm surprised about the wild blackberries, Jeff. When we lived in WA, we picked a lot of wild berries and they were always so sweet and good--of course, it's very wet in the Pacific NW Right now we're eating a lot of peaches!!! Too hot for berries.

[Jan Hurst-Nicholson]

It's the middle of winter here and our poinsettias are in flower. We have the ordinary one and the ramshorn poinsettia. There are also pink ones. They make a lovely show.
Our winter temps are very mild and rarely go below 10oC with an average of about 19oC high. 

[Jan Hurst-Nicholson]

One of our cycads in the common garden has come into fruit 

[Jeff Tanyard]

Quick Joro spider update for those who are interested in how this new species is adapting to North America...

There's one fully mature female who has been mature for at least a couple of weeks now.  The rest of the spiders are all juveniles, though a few of the juveniles are getting big and should be fully mature before long.

A few males have appeared in the webs, but only a few.  The mature female has a single suitor, and there are a couple of juvenile females who each have a single suitor.

I had my first physical run-in with a web today (which inspired this post).  I walked out the back door, and the top of my head was brushed by a silk strand.  There was a new web right above the door, and one of the anchor lines was low enough to catch my hair.  Obviously, the web had to come down.  The spider retreated to the eave as I destroyed its home and will, I assume, build a new web in a different location.  These things are very good at learning their lessons: when their webs are destroyed, they don't rebuild in the same place.  They move, even if it's just by a foot or so.

The Joros are very good at doing spider stuff.  Their webs are full of trophies, and I often see one actively eating on a fly or some other thing.  They are the most prolific spider species around, outnumbering all other spiders combined.

No hummingbirds have yet been caught in the webs.  This was a concern voiced by many people, but so far, it hasn't borne out, at least not in my backyard.

Joros have been spotted in Maryland and Pennsylvania in recent weeks.  Check out the map and click on a county for more details:

https://jorowatch.org/

Interestingly, the southern/eastern end of their range is currently at about the Fall Line.  I wonder if this will hold or if they just haven't ventured further south yet.  For those who aren't familiar with the ecosystem of this region, the Fall Line is a topographical and geological boundary, and some species only live on one side of it or the other.

https://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/geography-environment/fall-line/

If the Joros turn out to be a north-of-the-Fall-Line species, then that bodes well for any competing spider species down on the plain.

[LilyBLily]

If only Joro spiders ate lanternflies, they would be my new best friends. The West Virginia eastern panhandle seems infested with the lanternflies, which, oddly, I have encountered mostly at gas stations. (Praying mantises like parking lots, another "huh?")

It took me a while to identify the lanternflies. I saw them several weeks ago on a tree of heaven on my neighbor's property; they were clustered together so tightly around the base of the trunk that they almost made a garment. They're a boring tan color with dots unless their wings spread, and then you see the red. I alerted my neighbor, who cut down the tree and burned it. Lanternflies damage crops, especially grapes and apples. Virginia, nearby, has many vineyards. My part of West Virginia has many apple and peach orchards.

https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-e&q=lantern+fly

[Jeff Tanyard]

If only Joro spiders ate lanternflies, they would be my new best friends.

You're in luck.  The internet tells me they do indeed eat them.   

[Vijaya]

Since I'm not good at posting a picture here, I direct you to my blog for an unexpected flower: https://vijayabodach.blogspot.com/2024/09/bountiful-garden.html

[Jan Hurst-Nicholson]

Since I'm not good at posting a picture here, I direct you to my blog for an unexpected flower: https://vijayabodach.blogspot.com/2024/09/bountiful-garden.html

I tried growing turmeric, but I can't remember what happened to it. But I do remember it stains terribly if you're not careful. 
The flowers are very pretty. 

[Vijaya]

lol, I use turmeric all the time and have the stains to prove it. With the fresh turmeric, my fingers are stained for a couple of days...but they leave a quite pleasant flavor on my fingers for nibbling

[Jan Hurst-Nicholson]

lol, I use turmeric all the time and have the stains to prove it. With the fresh turmeric, my fingers are stained for a couple of days...but they leave a quite pleasant flavor on my fingers for nibbling

It's supposed to be a super food, so worth the stains. 

[Vijaya]

Absolutely! Turmeric is an anti-inflammatory. I had no idea until I started down a holistic health approach and discovered that all the things that I grew up on and enjoy very much, like onions, garlic, ginger, turmeric, pepper, are good for the body. These are all staples in our home so it's really nice to be able to grow them.